Top 50 Analysis Using Boardgamegeek Data

Imports and Helper Functions

The Top 50 Lists

Top 10

Of all the games in a top 50 list, the most important are the top 10. They are the best of the best, the cream of the crop. Therefore, we give them special precedence here by making a nice display of their cover art.

The Full Lists

Game Crossovers

In this section, we check how many games appeared on multiple individual's lists. Each listed grouping shows the games that only they had in common. That is, if a game is shared by three people, it will not show up in the group for any of the pairs.

Game Statistics

Comparing individual rankings against BGG rankings

In the following section, we compare each individual's ranking for a game against its ranking on Boardgamegeek. Because significant outliers in Boardgamegeek ranking can adversely affect the charts, we ignore any that are above the rank 2000. Omitting these games should have only a small effect on the results.

Here we plot each individual's rankings against each game's Boardgamegeek ranking. The more closely the points resemble a straight line, the more the individual's rankings match up with those on Boardgamegeek. The charts include a best fit line and a highlighted confidence interval. A larger confidence interval indicates that the rankings do not closely match the relative ordering for the games' BGG rankings.

The confidence intervals shown should be taken with a grain of salt, because they are greatly affected by outliers, which were removed to make these charts readable.

Here we see a box and whisker chart, showing the median and quartile ranges, as well as any outliers.

Seth and Zarin both have much larger clusters of games near the top of the BGG leaderboards than Jess, but also have more games far away from the top (and the dropped outliers would make this even more clear). With the outliers, the shape of the plots for Seth and Zarin would likely look much more similar.

Jess's choices all exist within the top 1000, and are fairly well distributed within the top ~400 games on Boardgamegeek.

Finally, we have a breakdown of how many games were in different ranges of BGG rankings. The total ranking distribution does include multiple instances of the same game if there is crossover. Because of this, these charts should be seen as "how many game rankings were in this range?", rather than "how many games were in this range?".

Repeating the similarity seen above, Seth and Zarin have the exact same breakdown in ranking distribution. Jess does not have the same large amount of games from the top 100, instead having far more in the 100-500 range.

Game weights

In this section we look at Boardgamegeek's "weight" for the selected games. The values range from 1 to 5, with more complex games scoring higher.

In the violin plots below, we can see the mean and quartile ranges as in the box and whisker plot, as well as the distribution of the data around that weight, shown as the width of the plot.

Jess's top 50 list has a marked focus on the lower end of the weight spectrum, with only a handful of games having a weight over ~3.5. In addition, he has the lowest mean, and by far the lowest 1st quartile. Interestingly, he also has the two selected games with the highest weights (Mage Knight and TI4, respectively).

Seth's games are much more tightly clustered around the mean than either Jess or Zarin, and his mean is fairly high as well.

Zarin has a fairly even spread over the entire spectrum of weights, with no clear outliers.

Player counts

In this section we will investigate the best player counts for games. Each game can support a certain number of players, and users on Boardgamegeek can vote "Best", "Recommended", and "Not Recommended" for each player count. Because a game may have multiple "best" player counts, we only consider the player count with the most "Best" votes as being the best for the purposes of this analysis.

Unsurprisingly, each person has a similar distribution of player counts. Four player games have a clear spike, but this should be expected because board games tend to be designed around four players.

Release Year

In this section, we investigate how each person's game selections break down by release dates. With such a wide range of possible dates, each chart only shows games from 1980 to today (selected semi-arbitrarily), but the omitted years for each individual are printed out above the charts.

Unsurprisingly, most games in these lists were released relatively recently, beginning to spike around the same time everyone was old enough to be able to pay for games. 😏

We can see that there are few games released from the last couple of years making it on the list, probably because they haven't been played enough to justify a spot yet.

User Rating Counts

We can also evaluate each individual's list by their relative popularity by using the game's number of ratings on Boardgamegee. Games with a low number of ratings will likely either be unpopular games or very new games, so we can use this metric to determine which individual has the most "underground" or "cult of the new" list.

First, let's look at the ten game selections with the lowest number of ratings. Right off the bat, we can see a couple problems. Catchphrase, Warhammer, and the Pokémon TCG are all very popular games, but BGG users likely don't feel the need to rate them on the site. Therefore, take the results from this section with a grain of salt.

Here we see a plot of the popularity distribution for each user. Right at the top, we see a large cluster of seemingly identical outliers. These points correspond to the "gateway games" in the lists with a lot of crossover, such as Carcassonne, Dominion, and Pandemic. Clearly, Seth has the most underground list in the group. The spread or popularity in his list is far lower than that of either Jess or Zarin.

Game Mechanics Statistics

On Boardgamegeek, every game is labeled with a set of mechanics, such as "card drafting" or "worker placement". In this section, we look at how each person's selections are distributed with respect to these mechanics.

Note that every game can have a large number of listed mechanics. For example, a simple game like No Thanks! has five associated mechanisms, and a complex game like "Twilight Imperium 4" lists twelve. Because of this disparity, this analysis becomes biased toward more complex games, as they will tend to have more mechanics. In addition, some of the mechanics are so generic as to describe just about anything in a board game. Taking the top n mechanics for a game was discussed, but it turns out that this is not a valid approach. As an example, the top two mechanics listed for Ticket To Ride are "Card Drafting" and "End Game Bonuses". These are mechanisms present in the game, but a better description would probably come from the 3rd, 4th, and 6th in the list, "Hand Management", "Network and Route Building", and "Set Collection". Therefore, all mechanics for a game are included in the analysis.

Below, we chart the 10 mechanics that appear the most overall, as well as the mechanic distribution for each individual. As above with the BGG ranking distributions, the total distribution does count games multiple times. Loosely, this means that the total chart should be interpreted as answering the question "how many game selections were made with this mechanic?"

The charts all have high counts for mechanics like "Hand Management" and "Dice Rolling", but this information is all but useless to us, because just about every game that includes cards or dice requires you to manage those cards or roll the dice.

Jess's rankings show a significant spike in games with the "Hand Management" mechanism, however, showing up nearly twice as often as the next mechanism. This is very likely due to the high number of pure card games in his list. We also see the only instance of "Grid Movement" among his top mechanics.

Seth's distribution tends to match the overall distribution fairly closely. Notably, "Worker Placement" only shows up on his top mechanics, taking 13 out of 19 of all "Worker Placement" rankings.

Zarin's mechanics are far more evenly distributed than either Jess or Seth. It might be interesting to note that "Hand Management" shows up lower than expected, especially compared to the others. We also see a holy trifecta of replayability: "Variable Player Powers", "Modular Board", and "Variable Set-Up", only the first of which shows up on the other lists.

Game Families Statistics

In this section, we analyze statistics about each game's "family". On Boardgamegeek, a family can refer to a high-level mechanism (e.g. 4X), certain types of components (e.g. miniatures), or many other groupings. Looking at the families overall will not give useful information, so each subfamily will be looked at individually below.

Kickstarter

The board game community has wholeheartedly embraced Kickstarter, for better or worse. The "Crowdfunding: Kickstarter" family notes a game that has been released on the platform. Here we ask the simple question? Which person has the most Kickstarter games on their list?

Component Family

The "Component:" family is used to categorize the physical construction of the game, and how they are used.

Each person seems to have one component that dominates their lists. For Jess, his large number of lighter games means card- and dice-focused components have the highest count. Seth has the largest disparity between the highest and second highest component counts, because he apparently loves maps. Zarin's top component is miniatures, which should be of no surprise after seeing his top 10.

Game Category Statistics

On Boardgamegeek, a game can be be assigned a set of categories that define the game at a high-level. These categories may describe the overall theme of the game (e.g. Pandemic falls under the "Medical" category), or they may describe what kind of a game it is (e.g. The Resistance is in the "Party Game" category).

The counts in this section are by request, not by game. To reiterate what has been said already in earlier sections, the overall chart should be seen as answering the question "how many selected games fall under this category?"

Overall, we can see that the vast majority of selections fall under the "Card Game" and "Economic" categories. This total category breakdown has few surprises other than that.

It has been mentioned many times previously, but Jess's list is heavily dominated by card games, and that fact is made very clear here. There are nearly twice as many in the "Card Game" category as the next instances. Shocking no one, the "Science Fiction" and "Space Exploration" categories rank very highly, outnumbering both Seth and Zarin combined (10 vs 6 and 3, respectively).

(Sorry Seth, I don't have much to say about your chart here. Maybe you need to pick more interesting games.)

Zarin clearly prefers fantasy games, that much is clear. Another interesting point is that Zarin has more games in the "Territory Building" category than both Jess and Seth combined (10 vs 4 and 4, respectively).